Hi,

I am doing some 'kicking the tyres' tests on Wikidata as Linked Data.  I like the SPARQL end-point, which is more helpful than most, and successfully managed a query for "people with the surname Light" last night.  (Only five of them in the world, apparently, but that's another matter. :-) )

What I do have an issue with is the content negotiation.  I kept failing to get an RDF rendition of my results, and as a last resort I read the documentation [1]. 

This described a postfix pattern which delivers RDF XML (e.g. [2]). However, this pattern is itself subject to content negotiation, and an initial 303 response converts the URL to e.g. [3].  I am interested in knowing what pattern of URL will deliver RDF/XML without requiring content negotiation, and the answer to that question is not [2] but [3].  This matters, for example, in scenarios where one wants to use XSLT's document() function to retrieve an RDF XML response directly.  The URL pattern [2] will fail.  So the documentation is currently unhelpful.

In a similar vein, is there a syntax for running a SPARQL query on Wikidata such that the response is delivered as RDF XML?  In many end-points there is a parameter you can add to specify the response format, which allows you to submit searches as HTTP requests and include the results directly in your (in my case XML-based) processing chain.  An HTML results page isn't very machine-processible!

Thanks,

Richard

[1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Data_access
[2] https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3807415.rdf
[3] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:EntityData/Q3807415.rdf

--

Richard Light

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